Profile – ElfURL

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I was reading Alexander Muse’s blog this morning and saw his post on ElfURL:

“Last Monday I posted an entry with an idea for a new little Web 2.0 application to replace Tinyurl. Basically I suggested that it would be helpful to have a tool to make long URLs shorter, while at the same time providing a way to apply delicious tags, while at the same time adding statistics on the number of times the URL was accessed, and while having those stats delivered via RSS.

I decided that the elves at Weblogs Work should be able to create such a tool and assigned them the task. We decided to call the Web 2.0 application elfURL. The tool is almost complete (the tagging function is not complete and the RSS feed might not be working perfectly). This is what is new about the Web 2.0 – idea to application within four days.”

I have been a user of TinyURL for a long time. It’s a neat tool to shorten long URLs into short ones.

Alexander’s thought was to take that basic idea behind TinyURL and add some web 2.0 flavor – tagging, stats and RSS. Now, you can (or soon will be able to – the functionality isn’t working yet) add tags to your short URLs, see the number of times the URL was used, and subscribe to the stats via RSS. Cool.

As an example of how the stats work, click here to see how many visitors we’ve sent to the site from this post (we converted their URL into an ElfURL)

They’ve also provided a snippet that you can add to a website and include the ElfURL functionality: